Friday, June 30, 2017

Remember when all we could talk about was how old and crotchety and out-of-date Nancy Pelosi is, and how everything bad that happens to the Democratic Party is her fault because she won't step aside as the party's leader in the House, or possibly kill herself? It seems as if that happened months ago, but it was just last week, after Democrats lost a couple of House special elections. Surely you haven't forgotten.

I said at the time that Nancy Pelosi isn't the problem -- yes, Republicans love to portray her in campaign attack ads as an evil progressive witch from the depths of hell, but if she were out of the picture they'd just find someone else to demonize. And there's no reason that new demon has to be a politician. Anyone who seems like a major figure in the all-powerful jackbooted army of liberalism will do.

Since that beat-up-on-Pelosi moment passed, conservatives have spent a lot of time attacking on CNN. And now we have Donald Trump attacking Joe Scarborough and (especially) Mika Brzezinski -- who's also a Democrat from one of the coasts and a woman past prime childbearing age, which means she's likely to be the next Photoshopped Wicked Witch of the West in every right-wing email forward and Facebook post.

Republicans regularly run against the media -- but their president genuinely hates his press antagonists more than any Republican since Nixon. As Jay Rosen notes, President Trump isn't even trying to use the press to sell his agenda to the public -- the White House/press relationship is all about giving committed Trumpers a battle of good vs. evil:

We are used to nominees who, when they win the White House, try to bring the country together by speaking to voters who did not support them in November. This is normal behavior. This is what we expect.

Trump rejects all that. His idea is to deepen the attachment between himself and his core supporters so that nothing can disturb that bond. The substitution of depth (of attachment) for breadth (of appeal) is confusing and disorienting to those who believe in consensus politics.

... Trump is not trying to win the support of anyone who is not naturally allied with him. This is abnormal behavior in an American president.

... Once persuasion drops out of the calculus, journalists seem less threatening as judges and more useful as foils. Peering out over the assembled press corps, the White House briefer has a choice of convenient hate objects. Shall it be Glenn Thrush or Jonathan Karl today… April Ryan or Hallie Jackson? Those called upon may think themselves empowered to put tough questions to the people in charge, but if the people in charge care only about the reactions of core supporters their task is all too simple: put down the liberal media. An easy win. And the one campaign promise the president seems able to keep.

This is going to keep happening, and increasingly the rest of the GOP is likely to join Trump in open, unabashed hostility to the mainstream media -- yes, maybe even Lindsey Graham and John McCain. Trump will have succeeded in turning the media into the real face of the Democratic Party, at least in the eyes of GOP base voters. Republicans will have to run on something other than a scant list of popular accomplishments, and so "Annoy the Media, Vote Republican," which has always been one of the GOP's messages, could become the party's main message.

So keep Nancy Pelosi in place. She may not even be the number one enemy of Republicans by 2018.

I think Donald Trump will stay in office for the duration of his term -- he won't quit because he's obsessed with avoiding the appearance of weakness, and Senate Republicans wouldn't vote to convict if a post-2018 Democratic House managed to impeach him. I think Trump will run for reelection, and I think he could win.

So I pondered this suggestion from The Hill's Brent Bukowsky -- but I think it's a lousy idea:

Scarborough should run against Trump in 2020

Former Republican congressman and current MSNBC host Joe Scarborough ... should enter the GOP primaries and run against Trump in the 2020 presidential campaigns....

Scarborough is a serious man. He served in the House of Representatives as a Republican and conservative and has a body of knowledge and experience that far surpasses any understanding of policy and issues that Trump will ever possess...

If Scarborough were to run for president, he could run against Trump as a Reagan Republican who does not praise dictators from Russia to the Philippines. He could run against Trump and promise he would not humiliate his secretary of State by proposing to cut the budget for the State Department by 30 percent, as Trump has done, or permitting a laughably inexperienced son-in-law to act like a shadow secretary of State, as Trump does every day....

Scarborough would be a strong and serious candidate.

The 2020 race should be a referendum on the job performance of Trump and his party -- but if Scarborough runs, the story of the first part of the campaign will be Trump Versus the Highfalutin East Coast Establishment, with Scarborough standing for all the Acela Corridor elitists the Trump coalition hates.

And I don't just mean white working-class deplorables -- financially comfortable Middle American suburbanites have also accepted the notion that there's a Deep State trying to oust Trump out of no motivation other than pure malice.

Trump won't have made the country better, so he's likely to have some trouble motivating voters in 2020 -- but a primary challenge from Scarborough, who can be portrayed as the blow-dried epitome of everything Trump voters hate, will get the juices flowing. Trump will be energized by the contest. Beating Scarborough will be like beating Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio -- a large percentage of GOP voters will think Trump deserves a second term precisely because he beat Scarborough.

And Trump would win. Oh, sure, Scarborough might do fairly well in New Hampshire, where right-centrists always have a chance. But in the South, West, and Midwest? Forget it. Trump is still seen as the blue-collar guy, the honorary redneck. Scarborough won't have a chance.

But couldn't a scare from Scarborough in a few states embarrass Trump? Yes, Eugene McCarthy's strong second-place showing in the 1968 New Hampshire Democratic primary was followed a couple of weeks later by Lyndon Johnson's withdrawal from the race. But Trump isn't going to retreat if he almost loses a key primary. Even if Scarborough overperforms, Trump will still win the nomination in the end, because there are more GOP voters who are motivated by anger than by respectability -- and winning is all that matters, to him and to his base. (See: November 2016 election results.)

A Scarborough challenge would also reduce the Democratic primary contest to second-tier status -- as in 2012, the media would regard the GOP contest as the one with all the glamour and excitement.

CNN's subhead is "Even by President Trump's standards, these tweets were shocking." Seriously? After "blood coming out of her wherever"? After Trump's arm-flapping mockery of disabled reporter Serge Kovaleski? After dozens of other sixth-grade-bully tweets and utterances over many, many years?

No, CNN, these tweets weren't shocking "even by President Trump's standards." They were shocking by the standards we'd like him to be upholding. They were shocking by the standards some of us want to imagine he's upholding because we want him to just be a normal (if somewhat uninformed) president so we can go about our lives and tell ourselves that everything is fine.

Everyone who thinks that way, please just stop. This is who Trump is. We've known this for a long time, and we elected him anyway.

Here’s a full transcription of Loesch’s rant, in case you prefer text. Bear in mind that these words are overlaid over ominous images of protest and street violence:

They use their media to assassinate real news. They use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler. They use their movie stars and singers and comedy shows and award shows to repeat their narrative over and over again. And then they use their ex-president to endorse “the resistance.”

All to make them march. Make them protest. Make them scream racism and sexism and xenophobia and homophobia. To smash windows, burn cars, shut down interstates and airports, bully and terrorize the law-abiding — until the only option left is for the police to do their jobs and stop the madness.

And when that happens, they’ll use it as an excuse for their outrage. The only way we stop this, the only way we save our country and our freedom, is to fight this violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth.

I’m the National Rifle Association of America. And I’m freedom’s safest place.

Why is this shocking? Why is it any more shocking than the famous mid-1990s letter from the NRA's Wayne LaPierre that referred to agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms as "jack-booted government thugs"? Why is it any more shocking than LaPierre's statement in 2012 after the Sandy Hook massacre?

The truth is that our society is populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters — people so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons that no sane person can possibly ever comprehend them. They walk among us every day.

... Killers, robbers, rapists and drug gang members who have spread like cancer in every community in this country. Meanwhile, federal gun prosecutions have decreased by 40% — to the lowest levels in a decade.

So now, due to a declining willingness to prosecute dangerous criminals, violent crime is increasing again for the first time in 19 years! Add another hurricane, terrorist attack or some other natural or man-made disaster, and you've got a recipe for a national nightmare of violence and victimization.

President Barack Obama, his axis in Congress and his media elite are gnawing at the country’s foundations intent on replacing our hallowed national character with their tyrannical political culture. It’s as if the values we’ve always lived by and counted on no longer matter, no longer make a difference.

What does it say about a political culture where madmen are famous and good guys forgotten? Where crimes go unpunished, leaving violent criminals to prey upon the innocent, and where tax collectors are turned into secret police for the government?

What does it say about a political culture in which the law has become a weapon wielded against ordinary citizens by those in power? How can good, decent Americans be expected to have faith in law and order if the law is selectively enforced? If the law is changed at the whims of the powerful? If the law is used for the advantage of the political elites and at the disadvantage of the rest of us? How can citizens respect laws in a nation in which those laws are so unequally and arbitrarily applied?

The list of lawless actions by this administration is virtually limitless: Operation “Fast and Furious” supplying guns to the Mexican drug cartels; using the IRS to harass and destroy political opposition; ordering free-speech gag-rules; releasing a massive number of criminal illegal aliens to prey on innocent Americans; refusing to secure the nation’s borders.

But there is more: negotiating with terrorists and freeing the worst Islamist killers from detention; abandoning commitments to our allies; using federal bank regulators to destroy lawful businesses like gun dealers; violating sunshine laws shutting down citizens’ lawful access to actions driving government decisions and mandates; massive surveillance of private communications between Americans, then blatantly lying to Congress about it.

... So to preserve our values and protect our freedom, America needs the good guys to step up like never before. That’s us. We are the good guys who will not stand idly by as the dishonest political and media elites strip our values away.

The National Rifle Association—all that we believe in and fight for—has become a metaphor for the core American liberty we all want preserved. The NRA is where you resist, and stand and fight to put America back on track to restore and preserve our individual freedom.

“Right now, we face a gathering of forces that are willing to use violence against us,” he said. “The leftist movement in this country right now is enraged. Among them and behind them are the most radical political elements there are: Anarchists, marxists, communists and the left of the—the rest of the left-wing socialist parade. They hate everything America stands for: Democracy, free market capitalism, representative government, individual freedom. They want to tear down our system and replace it with their collectivist top-down global-government-knows-best-utopia.”

LaPierre claimed that billionaire George Soros is paying protesters, that crime is on the rise, that gangs are infiltrating the military and law enforcement and that the media “theorized” Trump would be assassinated before Inauguration Day.

LaPierre wrapped up by attacking the media and insinuating violence against the “violent left” if it brings “terror” to communities....

“Make no mistake, if the violent left brings their terror to our communities, our neighborhoods or into our homes, they will be met with the result and the strength and the full force of American freedom in the hands of the American people, and we will win because we are the majority in this country,” LaPierre concluded.

If you didn't realize until now that NRA rhetoric is always like this, you haven't been paying attention. Maybe the only reason you're paying attention at this moment is that now it's aimed not just at people in government or Hollywood, but at suburbanite Resistance members in pink hats.

This is nothing new. Our culture has been experiencing this sort of degradation for years. I guess it's a good thing when people are actually paying attention.

You know how it usually goes: Republicans are extreme and relentlessly partisan, Democrats make regular outreach efforts, but when Democrats decide to stand up and fight for their own ideas, they're accused of excessive partisanship.

This is a boilerplate mainstream-media narrative. An alternative narrative is that both sides are to blame for partisanship, but Democrats are somehow worse.

However, because Donald Trump is so terrible at his job, it's now permissible to argue that excessive partisanship is the fault onf Republicans. At least that's what's happening in this New York Times story by Jennifer Steinhauer. Start with the headline:

Senate Democrats Sought to Work With Trump. Then He Began Governing.

No, you're not hallucinating. Democrats are getting credit for outreach. And Republicans are portrayed as the partisan party.

Shortly after President Trump won the White House, a cluster of Senate Democrats began the search for common cause with the unlikely new president, scouring the populist policy agenda that dominated his campaign.

For their part, Republicans believed that Mr. Trump’s win in nine states where Democratic senators are up for re-election next year would scare those lawmakers into acceptance of a Republican agenda, perhaps even voting to repeal President Barack Obama’s signature health care law.

Neither has come to pass.

Rather than taking advantage of his honeymoon phase to pick an issue on which Democrats from conservative states might be amenable — fixing the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, cutting taxes or stiffening immigration laws — Mr. Trump raced toward the most partisan corner of the room, pushing to repeal the health care law with no input from Democrats, in a manner that has proved deeply unpopular.

We're told that "Mr. Trump has rarely bothered to ask" for Democratic help. There are plaintive quotes about willingness to work in a bipartisan way from Claire McCaskill (“I am a moderate from a state Trump won. You’d think they would have called me sometime”), Joe Manchin, and Chuck Schumer. What Trump and congressional Republicans are doing is portrayed as a break with tradition:

[Max] Baucus, who served in leadership roles on the Senate Finance Committee, met with his Republican counterpart, Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, “every Tuesday at 5:30 for 12 years, even if it was just to talk about our kids,” Mr. Baucus said, and that helped pave the way for bipartisan legislation.

The most successful bills have historically come out of committees, because successful committee votes provide evidence of a policy’s ability to pass the full Senate, and pressure members of both parties to participate.

I know, I know -- in many ways, this is a standard-issue mainstream media call for a rejection of progressivism in favor of "respectable" moderate conservatism. But for once the Democrats aren't being portrayed as the angry radicals.

Although we're told that Mitch McConnell "has mostly iced out Democrats in this Congress," most of the blame falls on Trump:

"Early in new administrations, members look to work together where they can,” said Scott Mulhauser, who served in senior roles for several Democrats and committees in the Senate over the past decade. “There was a postelection moment where this president might have reached toward the center, delivered on priorities like infrastructure that cut across party lines and reconfigured the electoral math. Instead, he made little effort to collaborate, lurched rightward to his base while taunting the center and the left, and is now feeling the consequences. You reap the discord you sow.”

That tells me that this is seen as an anomalous state of affairs, one that's all the fault of the angry man in the White House. Remove him from the picture and the MSM will go back to blaming either "Washington" across the board or Democrats in particular for D.C. dysfunction.

GOP tax, budget, and health-care proposals would have been just as extreme under President Scott Walker or President Jeb Bush -- but their administrations would have managed the narrative much more skillfully, and Democrats would have received much more of the blame for any turbulence. It's Trump's fault that Republicans look like the bad guys for once in the mainstream press, but I'll take it.

Wednesday, June 28, 2017

Shortly after Jon Ossoff lost that special election, I noted that critics were urging the Democratic Party to put together a solid agenda in order to win elections, but Republicans apparently don't need much of an agenda to win. (Karen Handel beat Ossoff while running away from important parts of the GOP agenda.) A story in The Washington Post right now makes clear that running on attacks rather than an agenda is the GOP's plan for 2018:

The leader of the most important House GOP super PAC said Tuesday that the group will double-down on tried-and-true tactics for electing Republicans in 2018: tying Democratic candidates to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

The Congressional Leadership Fund, which has ties to House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), plans to spend $100 million on next year’s midterm elections, and Executive Director Corry Bliss said in a memo released Tuesday that he sees no reason to abandon a strategy that has paid dividends for six years — most recently in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District, where CLF advertising featuring Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her San Francisco district helped define and defeat Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff in this month’s special election there.

“During the 2018 cycle, CLF will spend millions of dollars highlighting Nancy Pelosi’s toxic agenda and reminding voters across the country that Democratic candidates are nothing more than rubber stamps for her out-of-touch, liberal policies,” Bliss said in the memo....

“While results pointed to different sets of key issues from one district to the next, we did find a common denominator: Nancy Pelosi,” Bliss wrote.

Excuse me: Nancy Pelosi isn't an issue. Health care is an issue. Immigration is an issue. Education is an issue. Nancy Pelosi is a human piñata. But this is apparently how the Republicans plan to run next year -- not on their positions on any actual issues, but on OOGA BOOGA KILL THE WITCH.

A Quinnipiac poll last month, in fact, showed exactly 50 percent of registered voters had an unfavorable view of her vs. just 30 percent who had a favorable one. Even among Democrats, about 1 in 5 (19 percent) didn't like Pelosi. And independents were overwhelmingly anti-Pelosi, with 58 percent disliking her and 23 percent holding a positive view of her.

But that same poll shows Paul Ryan with a 54% unfavorable rating and only a 27% favorable rating; 26% of Republicans view him unfavorably. All three of those numbers are worse than the numbers the CLF quotes for Pelosi. But Republicans are still going to try to frame every campaign in 2018 as a referendum on her.

Well, of course they don't want to frame those campaigns as referenda on their own agenda (tax cuts for the rich, primarily), much less on their own accomplishments in the Trump era (still waiting). And yet they'll almost certainly retain control of the Senate and could well keep control of the House. Agendas are for suckers, I guess.

President Trump wasn't much help to Senate Republicans as they tried to ram through their McConnellcare bill this week -- not surprising when you consider the fact that Trump, according to The New York Times,lacks even a basic understanding of the bill:

Until Tuesday’s meeting at the White House, Mr. Trump had spoken with only a few members of the Senate, according to an administration official....

A senator who supports the bill left the meeting at the White House with a sense that the president did not have a grasp of some basic elements of the Senate plan — and seemed especially confused when a moderate Republican complained that opponents of the bill would cast it as a massive tax break for the wealthy, according to an aide who received a detailed readout of the exchange.

On that subject, Trump seems a tad defensive:

Some of the Fake News Media likes to say that I am not totally engaged in healthcare. Wrong, I know the subject well & want victory for U.S.

Obviously Trump could never do that. What Trump and his allies did this month was attack a GOP moderate who's vulnerable to defeat in 2018, a move that infuriated Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell:

Over the weekend, Mr. McConnell made clear his unhappiness to the White House after a “super PAC” aligned with Mr. Trump started an ad campaign against Senator Dean Heller, Republican of Nevada, after he said last week that he opposed the health care bill.

The majority leader — already rankled by Mr. Trump’s tweets goading him to change Senate rules to scuttle Democratic filibusters — called the White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, to complain that the attacks were “beyond stupid,” according to two Republicans with knowledge of the tense exchange.

McConnell has also been stewing about another race: the Alabama Senate primary, which has turned into a personal priority for the majority leader. For weeks, McConnell and top political aides had been asking the Republican National Committee to release coordinated funding to help newly appointed Sen. Luther Strange, who is trying to fend off a large field of GOP primary opponents in a late summer special election....

Yet after weeks of requests, no RNC expenditures have been granted, and Senate Republican strategists began to wonder whether the requests had simply been lost in a bureaucratic logjam — or worse, whether the anti-establishment president was reluctant to have the national party wade into a contested primary.

This is happening even though one of the top potential challengers to Strange, Mo Brooks, attacked Trump during the presidential campaign, although he's now a Trump backer:

“I think what you are going to see 12 to 18 months from now is that a lot of people who have supported Donald Trump, they are going to regret having done so,” Brooks told MSNBC in February 2016, one day before the pivotal Super Tuesday primaries.

“For those of us who believe in certain things like border security, like a stronger economy, like a strong national defense, like low taxes, like moral values, you’re going to find that on a significant number of those issues, Donald Trump is not going to do what people think he’s going to do.”

... “I don’t support people who support adultery and I don’t trust people who are serial adulterers, as Donald Trump has been and bragged about in writing, because I don’t think that is an honorable thing or trait in a person.”

Trump has already complicated the GOP’s 2018 candidate recruitment plans, dating back to just before the inauguration, when the president nominated Montana Republican Ryan Zinke to the Interior secretary post. McConnell had been pursuing Zinke for months, viewing the congressman as a prized recruit who could defeat Democratic Sen. Jon Tester in 2018, and had met with him to discuss a possible race. Top party strategists had reviewed polling data suggesting that Zinke would start out the contest in a virtual dead heat with the incumbent.

When he found out that Trump was about to tap Zinke for the Cabinet post, McConnell launched a late effort to get him to reconsider.... It didn’t work.

McConnell had been pushing the White House to appoint a pair of red-state Democratic incumbents up for reelection in 2018, West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, to Cabinet positions — a gambit that would have improved the GOP’s odds of seizing their seats.

Yet Trump ignored the advice. While Manchin and Heitkamp were invited to Trump Tower ... neither was tapped.

Also:

In Arizona, where Republican Sen. Jeff Flake, a Trump critic, is facing a difficult reelection, Trump-fueled primary worries are intensifying. Prior to the 2016 election, Trump vented openly about Flake’s criticism of him — at one point, backstage before a campaign rally in Arizona, telling top aides animatedly that he wanted to find a Republican opponent to challenge the senator in 2018, according to two people familiar with the exchange. The administration’s anger at Flake has flared anew amid his criticism of the president’s decision to fire former FBI Director James Comey.

Flake has already drawn a Trump-friendly primary opponent in former state Sen. Kelli Ward, and two other allies of the president — Trump 2016 campaign COO Jeff DeWit and former state GOP chair Robert Graham — could also try to unseat him.

But while Trump comes in for a lot of criticism in these stories, there's a great deal of praise for Mike Pence. From the Times story:

... over the past few weeks, the Senate Republican leadership has made it known that it would much rather negotiate with Mr. Pence than a president whose candidacy many did not even take seriously during the 2016 primaries.

Among party operatives, there is extensive praise reserved for Vice President Mike Pence, who has emerged as the administration’s de facto ambassador to Republicans planning for next year’s races.

Pence has begun promoting the party’s Senate contenders. During a stop in West Virginia, Pence asked to take a photo with GOP Rep. Evan Jenkins, who is challenging Manchin, and then posted the picture on his Twitter feed, accompanied by the caption: “Enjoyed seeing Rep. @EvanJenkinsWV while visiting Charleston, WV today. Thanks to his leadership we will Make America Great Again.”

It's hard to imagine congressional Republicans embracing the notion of removing the president from office -- not when Trump continues to have 80% job approval among Republicans, according to a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll. But is it conceivable that McConnell and company will start cooperating a bit more with investigations into Trump, at least sub rosa? It seems to me that they'd be crazy not to. They can see Trump is a dead loss for them. They can see that Pence is much more competent. What are they waiting for?

Tuesday, June 27, 2017

Senate Republican leaders have done an abrupt about-face on the health care bill: They're now planning to delay the vote to take up the bill until after the July 4 recess, according to two senior GOP aides. They say Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made the announcement at the beginning of today's Senate Republican lunch.

Senate Republicans have been tasked with reaching a new health care agreement by Friday, two senior GOP aides say. A new draft bill can then be sent to the Congressional Budget Office for analysis over next week's recess, and then the Senate will vote on the bill when it returns.

Will McConnell make the bill more horrible or less horrible? I think we can answer that question if we look at what McConnell was saying before he pulled the bill:

Mitch McConnell is delivering an urgent warning to staffers, Republican senators and even the president himself: If Obamacare repeal fails this week, the GOP will lose all leverage and be forced to work with Chuck Schumer.

... Voters expect Republicans to deliver on their long-held promise to repeal the law, McConnell said.... And failing to repeal the law would mean the GOP would lose its opportunity to do a partisan rewrite of the law that could scale back Medicaid spending, cut Obamacare’s taxes and repeal a host of industry mandates.

Instead, Republicans would be forced to enter into bipartisan negotiations with Democrats to save failing insurance markets.

We know that objections to the bill were raised by both moderate Republican senators and far-rightists. Which group do you think would be upset at the prospect of bipartisan negotiations?

Here's one of the moderates, Lisa Murkowski:

PRESS: Would you be willing to join with DEMS to FIX the ACA rather than start over ?

The prospect of working with Democrats doesn't frighten her. It probably wouldn't frighten Susan Collins or Dean Heller, either. So McConnell's dire warning wasn't aimed at gtting them to fall in line.

The warning was intended to scare Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and other far-rightists into backing the bill. Those guys absolutely don't want to work with Democrats. The warning didn't work, but the nature of it tells me that McConnell thought he needed to focus on the far-rightists in order to get to 50 votes (on the assumption, perhaps, that moderates are likely to cave).

This is probably what McConnell still believes. So my guess is that this bill is only going to get worse -- and if it does, it's possible it will pass.

Kellyanne Conway has been rebuked by the White House after she appeared on television urging the public to buy the branded products of the president’s daughter Ivanka....

Richard Painter, former White House chief ethics lawyer to former president George W Bush, said federal employees were prohibited from using their official position for private gain for “yourself or anybody, including your boss”.

She was later rebuked by Walter Shaub, director of the Office of Government Ethics, although the OGE did not have the authority to punish her (and the White House, of course, chose not to).

An employee shall not use his public office for his own private gain, for the endorsement of any product, service or enterprise, or for the private gain of friends, relatives, or persons with whom the employee is affiliated in a nongovernmental capacity, including nonprofit organizations of which the employee is an officer or member, and persons with whom the employee has or seeks employment or business relations. The specific prohibitions set forth in paragraphs (a) through (d) of this section apply this general standard, but are not intended to be exclusive or to limit the application of this section.

Trump was affiliated with Fox News in a nongovernmental capacity -- he appeared on Fox & Friends on a regular basis. He's a close friend of Rupert Murdoch, who runs Fox News.

We know that Trump is flagrantly violating the Constitution's emoluments clause on an ongoing basis. This is trivial by comparison. But The Hill story doesn't even raise the question of whether this is an ethics violation.

It is. But as with Trump's presidential buckraking, we'll all just shrug and move on.

Overturning Obamacare is by far the most significant thing congressional Republicans and President Trump have tried to do this year. We're frequently told that this is a high priority for GOP elected officials because every Republican ran on repealing and replacing Obamacare, and base voters will punish Republican elected officials if they don't make good on this promise.

So you'd think the repeal effort would be front-page news on right-wing sites. In fact, it's barely visible on those sites.

Here's the current front page at FoxNews.com. I've circled the most prominent story on the health care fight:

Can you see it down at the bottom? The headline is "Senate health bill would lower deficit, increase number of uninsured, CBO says." It's in tiny type (though it is boldface). It's in the same typeface as the headline "North Korea 'amazed' by Spanish beach resort known for drinking binges, plans knock-off" -- though that North Korea story has a higher placement.

Nothing at the top -- in fact, if you scroll down, there are twenty-seven stories before you get to the first one about Obamacare repeal. Among the items given more prominence: "Eric Bolling Talks New Book, Trump Tweets, Senate Run," "University Of South Dakota Scraps Guidelines That Threatened Punishment For Teasing," and "Even Jared Kushner Is Talking About This Dress Melania Trump Wore [PHOTOS]."

Nothing at the top of the page, though there are several McConnellcare stories just below that in the "Trending Now" category, where they're in among such stories as "CHINA’S WILD SWINGS ON THE GAME OF GOLF: RICH MAN’S GAME" and "BUFFETT’S VICE CHAIR – AL GORE IS ‘AN IDIOT.’"

The biggest story in the right-wing media at this moment -- it's leading at Breitbart and Gateway Pundit -- is the newest James O'Keefe nothingburger, a hidden-camera interview with a CNN producer named James Bonifield, who (in response to a great deal of prodding) says that CNN's focus on the Trump-Russia story might be "bullshit." Here's how Breitbart writes this up:

“Could be bullshit. I mean, it’s mostly bullshit right now,” the CNN producer, John Bonifield, said in a video O’Keefe’s Project Veritas released on Tuesday, when asked about his thoughts on the Russia investigation. “Like, we don’t have any giant proof. Then they say, well there’s still an investigation going on. And you’re like, yeah, I don’t know. If they were finding something we would know about it. The way these leaks happen, they would leak it. They’d leak. If it was something really good, it would leak... The leaks keep leaking and there’s so many great leaks, and it’s amazing. I just refuse to believe that if they had something really good like that that wouldn’t leak because we’ve been getting all these other leaks. So, I just feel like they don’t really have it but they want to keep digging. And so I think the president is probably right to say, like, look you are witch hunting me. You have no smoking gun. You have no real proof.”

But that's what's getting pulses to race in Wingnut Land -- not Obamacare repeal. Even though repeal has supposedly been every Republican voter's top priority for seven years, the right-wing press doesn't want to talk about the bill that could get repeal done. The contents of the bill aren't proudly enumerated in prominent stories. The legislative strategy isn't being discussed. Why, you'd almost think the folks in the right-wing media realize they have a dog of a bill and want to keep quiet about it.

[The bill] nearly triples the deficit reduction estimates for the House bill (from $119 billion to $321 billion), mostly because of a combination of a delay in the repeal of certain Obamacare taxes and reconfigured health-insurance purchasing subsidies....

As a practical matter the higher deficit-reduction number is pleasing to conservatives, but also gives McConnell a slush fund to buy “moderate” votes with more generous spending provisions.

There you go. It's not just that McConnell will now begin making deals -- he built the bill to give him the money to do so. Or maybe he didn't know he'd get this "slush fund" and just lucked out. (But note that the bill's drafters were sending portions of it to the Congressional Budget Office as it was being written, so there probably weren't too many surprises in today's CBO report.) But this money is what McConnell is going to horse-trade with. So even though it appears that three senators -- Rand Paul, Susan Collins, and Dean Heller -- will vote no on a motion to proceed to a vote, there are deals to be made. If you live in a state with a Republican senator or two, keep the pressure on.

I'll grant that this wasn't the most important news coming from the Supreme Court today....

The Supreme Court declined to review a case about the right to carry firearms outside the home, but two justices publicly dissented from their colleagues' decision not to take up the issue.

The high court said Monday it would not hear a National Rifle Association-supported legal challenge by California resident Edward Peruta, who challenged a state law limiting gun-carrying permits to those showing "good cause" and a San Diego County policy that says concern about personal safety is not sufficient to fulfill the requirement.

But the story -- from Politico -- is infuriating because of this passage:

The most notable aspect of the action announced Monday was that President Donald Trump's newest appointee to the court — Justice Neil Gorsuch — joined conservative stalwart Justice Clarence Thomas in lamenting the court's decision to dodge the issue for now. Gorsuch's views on gun-rights issues were not well established by his writing or his earlier decisions as a judge on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Really? It's a surprise that Gorsuch is further to the right on guns than even three of his Republican-appointed colleagues?

Newsweek's Robyn Thomas and Adam Skaggs wrote this when Gorsuch was under consideration for the Supreme Court vacancy:

In one case, he threw out illegal gun possession charges against a convicted felon, and in another, Gorsuch bent over backwards to decide a case on procedural grounds rather than acknowledge that convicted domestic abusers don’t enjoy the same gun rights as law-abiding citizens—a generally uncontroversial view shared by the vast majority of conservative politicians and voters.

In a third case, Gorsuch repeatedly sided with another convicted felon who argued he shouldn’t be held accountable for illegally possessing a gun based on the far-fetched claim that he didn’t know he was a felon. Fortunately, the majority of Gorsuch’s colleagues on the 10th Circuit—and judges on every other appeals courts to consider the issue—rejected his outlier stance, making it, by definition, outside the mainstream.

Gorsuch was also the beneficiary of a million-dollar ad buy from the NRA when his nomination was before the Senate. Dana Loesch said,

“I can’t stress how unbelievably important it is to make sure Neil Gorsuch is confirmed, because our Second Amendment rights depend on this."

But AP found a gun scholar who said Gorsuch was "a Second Amendment mystery," so many right-thinking citizens were led to believe that he might be a reasonable right-centrist on the issue.

Conservatism in America has moved inexorably to the right over the years, so of course Gorsuch is going to be in the vanguard on guns. Any future Trump court picks are going to be as far to the right as he is. But we were supposed to take all apparent evidence of Gorsuch's moderation -- on this and other issues -- very, very seriously, and we'll be similarly bamboozled with future judicial picks. We never learn.

For weeks now, liberal activists and Democratic senators have struggled to capture the public’s focus in their campaign to halt Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s momentum to repeal Obamacare. Now that the GOP bill is public, its expected coverage losses are likely to make it as deeply unpopular as the House’s plan — yet the left is facing a perilously narrow window to pick off wavering Republican senators and sink the bill before this week’s vote.

That messaging crisis is not for lack of trying. But progressives have been stymied by Republicans’ strategy of keeping the bill behind closed doors as well as a crowded media landscape fixated more on Trump’s tweets and Russia scandal than on the intricacies of Medicaid spending. And then there's money: Democrats have been vastly outspent by Republicans in ad wars over Obamacare repeal.

But Josh Marshall, although he still thinks the bill will pass, believes the pressure is starting to work:

Obviously, the pressure is coming from both sides -- the Koch brothers dislike the Senate bill because it's not harsh enough, and the loudest objections among senators are coming from the right (see, for instance, Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson's New York Times op-ed). But pressure from our side adds to pressure from the right. I think it really is making a difference, although I wouldn't say that we're winning.

I've been puzzled from the beginning by McConnell's decision to release the bill early on a Thursday -- why not keep it super-secret and let it dribble out late on a summer Friday afternoon? He's not giving the opposition much time to gather strength, but he could have been even more cold-blooded and given us even less time.

I wonder if the plan, or at least the backup plan, is this: Allow a limited freakout that possibly sends the bill to defeat, or at least inspires McConnell to pull it from the floor. We do a victory dance and go back to talking about Russia. Then McConnell quietly makes a few cosmetic changes, returns the bill to the floor even faster, and gets it passed. The House rubber-stamps it hours later and it's all over but the bill-signing.

I've seen it argued that that was the trick that got the House bill passed -- you show the public an unappealing baseline bill, which doesn't pass, then make minor changes to it and it does pass ... and it's assumed that the revised bill must be less awful than the original version. Also, you pass the revision after the opposition's energy level has peaked.

Is that what going to happen? Is "must pass this by July 4" the real kabuki here? Is the plan (or at least Plan B) to fail now and succeed after the holiday? That's what I'm afraid of.

Sunday, June 25, 2017

The Democrats just got skunked four to nothing in races they excitedly thought they could win because everyone they hang with hates Trump.

If Trump is the Antichrist, as they believe, then Georgia was going to be a cakewalk, and Nancy Pelosi was going to be installed as speaker before the midterms by acclamation. But it turned into another soul-sucking disappointment.

The special House elections were in Kansas, South Carolina, Montana, and Georgia. Do you know anyone who thought Democrats could win all four? Or even three? A few people saw hope in Montana because it has a Democratic governor and one Democratic senator, but it votes solidly Republican in every presidential election and hasn't elected a Democrat to the House since 1993.

Jon Ossoff's victory in Georgia seemed well within reach, but I know of no one who thought it would be a "cakewalk." And while Dowd tacks on the bit about Pelosi being installed as Speaker by acclamation in order to suggest that the whole thing is hyperbole, what leads up to it sure doesn't read as if Dowd's kidding. She needs to portray Democrats as victims of hubris or her column falls apart. Who cares about the facts?

Democrats cling to an idyllic version of a new progressive America where everyone tools around in electric cars, serenely uses gender-neutral bathrooms and happily searches the web for the best Obamacare options. In the Democrats’ vision, people are doing great and getting along. It is the opposite of Trump’s dark diorama of carnage and dystopia — but just as false a picture of America.

Maureen, please find me any mention in the four Democratic special election campaigns of a 100% shift away from internal-combustion cars. Please find me a celebration of gender-neutral bathrooms. Jon Ossoff did campaign on attracting more high-tech jobs to his district, but it's a highly educated district, so that makes sense. He also readily acknowledged that Obamacare isn't ideal. In South Carolina, Archie Parnell ran as a self-mocking green-eyeshade guy whose knowledge of the tax code would "bore you to tears" but would give him the skills to oversee spending wisely. (Parnell came closer to victory than Ossoff.)

With Jon Ossoff, as with Hillary Clinton, the game plan was surfing contempt for Trump and counting on the elusive Obama coalition.

I'm pretty sure Ossoff was counting on the Clinton coalition, which nearly beat Trump in the district in 2016.

The party still seems flummoxed that there are big swaths of the country where Democrats once roamed that now regard the Democratic brand as garbage and its long-in-the-tooth leadership as overstaying its welcome. The vibe is suffocating. Where’s the fresh talent?

Kansas, Montana, South Carolina, and Georgia are "swaths of the country where Democrats once roamed"? Not for decades in the latter two states, and never in the former. And as for "long in the tooth," the president Dowd is praising for his shutout of the Democrats is 71 years old, and the youth hero for many left-leaning voters, Bernie Sanders, is 75.

Ossoff is "fresh talent" -- he was born in 1987, which means he was trying to win a district that literally hasn't elected a Democrat in his lifetime, and he almost pulled it off in the first round of voting. There's more "fresh talent" around the country -- Kamala Harris, Adam Schiff, Kristen Gillibrand -- but these are smart people, not charismatic frat bros, so they don't set off the right heat meters.

They have to drum up suburban candidates who reflect their districts, Emanuel says, noting that [Democrats] wrenched back control of Congress [in the 2006 midterms] by recruiting a football player in North Carolina, an Iraq veteran in Pennsylvania and a sheriff in Indiana.

[Congressman Tim] Ryan says Democrats need to stop microtargeting. “They talked to a black person about voting rights, a brown person about immigration, a gay about gay rights, a woman about choice and on and on, slicing up the electorate,” he said. “But they forgot that first and foremost, people have to pay their mortgages and get affordable health care.”

"Pretty much every message that Trump put out was data-driven," Alexander Nix [of Cambridge Analytica] remembers. On the day of the third presidential debate between Trump and Clinton, Trump's team tested 175,000 different ad variations for his arguments, in order to find the right versions above all via Facebook. The messages differed for the most part only in microscopic details, in order to target the recipients in the optimal psychological way: different headings, colors, captions, with a photo or video. This fine-tuning reaches all the way down to the smallest groups, Nix explained in an interview with us. "We can address villages or apartment blocks in a targeted way. Even individuals."

Look, the four losses sting. And Democrats do have problems. But David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report is right about the 2018 map being favorable to the Democrats, because there are many districts more competitive than these special-election districts were:

Although it's true Democrats have agonizingly yet to capture a red district, they have outperformed their "generic" share of the vote significantly in every contest. Measured against the Cook Political Report's Partisan Voter Index (PVI), Democrats have outperformed the partisan lean of their districts by an average of eight points....

If Democrats were to outperform their "generic" share by eight points across the board in November 2018, they would pick up 80 seats. Of course, that won't happen because Republican incumbents will be tougher to dislodge than special election nominees. But these results fit a pattern that should still worry GOP incumbents everywhere....

Put another way, Democratic candidates in these elections have won an average of 68 percent of the votes Hillary Clinton won in their districts, while Republican candidates have won an average of 54 percent of Trump's votes. That's an enthusiasm gap that big enough to gravely imperil the Republican majority next November—even if it didn't show up in "the special election to end all special elections."

But if Dowd had acknowledged that, she wouldn't have had a column. Why let the facts get in the way of some enjoyable Democrat-bashing?

Saturday, June 24, 2017

Right-wingers can complain all they want about "the angry left," but "the angry right" is welcome in the White House. It's not just Ted Nugent. It's this guy:

An adviser to Donald Trump’s campaign who said Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton should be shot for treason was given a prime seat at a White House bill-signing ceremony on Friday.

Al Baldasaro, a New Hampshire GOP state representative who advised Trump on veterans issues during the campaign, sat in one of the first two rows of seats in the East Room as Trump signed a bill making it easier for the Veterans Administration to fire employees accused of misconduct.

Baldasaro, in a radio interview during the campaign, criticized Clinton for the 2012 attack on a U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya, and said she should be “put in the firing line and shot for treason.” Trump later praised Baldasaro.

Before William C. Bradford was appointed by the Trump administration to run the Energy Department’s Office of Indian Energy, he tweeted a slew of disparaging remarks about the real and imagined ethnic, religious and gender identities of former president Barack Obama, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, TV news host Megyn Kelly and Japanese Americans during World War II.

This would not be the first time Bradford courted controversy — except that it previously concerned a lengthy, 95-page law journal article rather than several short, 140-character-or-fewer tweets. In 2015, he resigned from his post at West Point after writing an academic paper arguing the United States should threaten to destroy Muslim holy sites in war “even if it means great destruction, innumerable enemy casualties, and civilian collateral damage.”

Bradford also called for legal scholars “sympathetic to Islamist aims” to be imprisoned or “attacked.” He dubbed such academics “critical law of armed conflict academy,” or CLOACA, which is also a term for the orifice out of which some animals defecate.

The term is ostensibly an abbreviation for “counter-law-of-armed-conflict academy;” he wields his backronym with the same sinister tones that James Bond reserved for SPECTRE.

And his target list is quite expansive:

To suppress this “fifth column”—which is his actual term for fellow academics with whom he disagrees—Bradford offers a range of options. First, he suggests introducing loyalty oaths and firing “disloyal scholars.” Next, he recommends charging them with material support of terrorism and even treason. He even suggests treating these American academics as “unlawful enemy combatants,” a legal term used to deny Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters the protections of U.S. and international law.

Shocking and extreme as this option might seem, CLOACA scholars, and the law schools that employ them, are—at least in theory—targetable so long as attacks are proportional, distinguish noncombatants from combatants, employ nonprohibited weapons, and contribute to the defeat of Islamism.

Yes, even “the law schools that employ them”—presumably places like Harvard and Yale—could be legitimate military targets. So, too, could their homes, where their families and children live. Even a journalist like myself could be a lawful military target if I happen to quote one of these professors, Bradford argues:

Further, the infrastructure used to create and disseminate CLOACA propaganda—law school facilities, scholars’ home offices, and media outlets where they give interviews—are also lawful targets given the causal connection between the content disseminated and Islamist crimes incited.

Let me say it again: This man has a job in the Trump administration.

Johnny Depp joked about a Trump assassination (and has now apologized) -- but he's not in the government. Neither is Kathy Griffin (who's lost work for her Trump death joke).

Cutting spending on the poor to facilitate a huge tax cut for the rich, in many ways, is the plan.

But what if a large majority of Americans don’t have a clear sense that the plan even does this? A new Kaiser Family Foundation poll out today suggests this may be the case, which hints at a number of troubling things about where this debate is headed next.

The Kaiser poll finds that only 38 percent of Americans know that the GOP plan makes “major reductions” in Medicaid spending. Another 27 percent say it makes “minor” reductions; 13 percent say it makes no reductions; and 20 percent say they don’t know. If this polling is right, that means at least 6 in 10 Americans are unaware of the central feature of the GOP plan....

Why don't they know this? According to Sargent, it's because Republicans are so clever:

All of this suggests that in some key ways, the GOP strategy is working. Republicans have gone to enormous lengths to obscure the plan’s profoundly regressive features. They have endlessly told the lie that no one will be worse off (because everyone will have “access” to affordable coverage), and they’ve developed numerous cleverly designed talking points designed to create the impression that, by slowly phasing in the loss of coverage for millions over time, this will create a painless transition to … well, to a blissful state in which everyone, again, has “access” to affordable coverage.

Left unmentioned by Sargent is the fact that an institution of which he's a part -- the mainstream press -- could have been giving a great deal of attention to this fact and informing us in prominently placed news stories that a Republican bill really could become law in early July. This has been clear since early this month, but Russiagate and various Trump kerfuffles were of so much interest that the news barely trickled out.

Brian Beutler of The New Republic has attributed this failure to "the media bias toward 'new' news." But how can it be argued that there was no "new" news here? It had been widely assumed that the Senate would struggle to pass a health care bill, then suddenly it became clear to reporters who were paying attention that Senate Republicans weren't struggling, and the wiliest, sneakiest, most amoral tactician in Washington, Mitch McConnell, was putting the bill on a glide path to passage by July 4. That wasn't news? Reporters who were paying attention knew that the Medicaid cuts were comparable in their severity to the cuts in the House bill. That wasn't news? To gain prominence, does every story have to be gift-wrapped for reporters and editors by sources who want the story out?

The media failed us in the 2016 election, obsessing over emails rather than issues. The media failed again this month.

In The New York Times, Bret Stephens blames Jon Ossoff's loss on Democratic and liberal contempt.

Whatever else might be said about the race, Democrats didn’t lose for lack of political talent, campaign financing and organization or enthusiasm among their base. They lost because of their brand.

What is that? Democrats may think the brand is all about diversity, inclusion and fairness. But for millions of Americans, the brand is also about contempt — intellectual contempt ...; moral contempt of the sort Hillary Clinton felt for Trump....

That contempt may be justified. But in politics, contempt had better not be visible. Voters notice.

Voters notice? Well, I've noticed that Republicans have nothing but contempt for Democrats. All through the Obama years, they talked of "taking our country back" -- as if liberals and Democrats literally aren't Americans. And do I have to repost the ad for Karen Handel that smeared Jon Ossoff's out-of-state donors as a lot of contemptible Californians? I'm sure Scott Brown got a dollar or two from Red America when he ran for the Senate in Massachusetts, but imagine if there'd been a Democratic ad depicting his backers as a bunch of ignorant Bible Belt rednecks -- the howls of outrage would have audible from space.

Republicans also shriek if you link them to Timothy McVeigh and murderers of abortion doctors. But Ossoff was linked to Alexandria shooter James Hodgkinson, and that was just considered tough-minded politics.

Whatever their misgivings about Trump, ... Republicans weren’t about to give Nancy Pelosi the satisfaction of a national victory. Contemporary liberalism now expresses itself chiefly in the language of self-affirmation and moral censure: of being the party of the higher-minded.....

Oh, there was no "self-affirmation" in the Tea Party movement? There's none in the gun-rights movement or the #MAGA cult? There's no "moral censure" involved in the portrayal of liberals as snowflakes and moochers?

And can we talk about Nancy Pelosi for a second? Donald Trump is the great victim because he was portrayed as the murdered Julius Caesar in a Shakespeare production, and all of America was supposed to be horrified, but in 2010 Pelosi was depicted in a campaign ad as a melting Wicked Witch of the West after her then-Republican opponent tossed water on her.

Yes, it's a joke. But Kathy Griffin's Trump severed head was a joke, and universal outrage was demanded. This was, effectively, a fictional death for Pelosi. It was certainly "contempt."

But that was okay. Decent people weren't expected to feel contempt for all Republicans in response to this, or to the many other depictions of Pelosi and Hillary Clinton as witches, or to depictions of Barack Obama as a witch doctor, or either of the Obamas as primates. No one will harrumph in a mainstream-media op-ed that that alone is enough reason to reject every Republican at the polls. Democrats are just supposed to take it.

Thursday, June 22, 2017

Stephanie Woodward, of Rochester, NY, who has spina bifida and uses a wheelchair, is removed from a sit-in at Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office as she and other disability rights advocates protest proposed funding caps to Medicaid, Thursday, June 22, 2017, on Capitol Hill in Washington. CREDIT: AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

Here's another image:

That's from ad made by the Congressional Leadership Fund for Karen Handel, the Republican who just won a special election for a House seat in Georgia. It shows a man with long braids praising the candidate Handel defeated, Jon Ossoff, in San Francisco.

I'm told that Andrea Mitchell of NBC News thinks images like the first one are so disturbing they may doom the GOP health care bill:

MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell described the scene of disabled protesters being carried out by Capitol police in front of Mitch McConnell's office as "brutal" images for the Republican party....

Mitchell said, ... "We had people being carried out by Capitol police, clearly they are under orders to clear the hallways. It is not their fault, but this is what they're being told by House leadership and Senate leadership to do." ...

"This is clearly outside of senator Mitch McConnell's offices. A brutal image for Republicans and supporters of this bill, frankly," Andrea remarked.

Here's a clip:

And in case you missed it when I included it in an earlier post, here's that Karen Handel ad:

Mitchell thinks it's self-evident that most Americans will be disturbed by the sight of forced removals of handicapped protestors worried about whether they'll be able to afford health care. But if you're a Republican in America, the campaign ad upsets you more. It's full of people you think are trying to do you harm -- by raising your taxes, weakening America's defenses, and allowing Democrats to have any power whatsoever.

The fate of those disabled protestors won't shock Republicans' consciences. The protestors, after all, are effectively in league with Mr. Braids and all his friends who want to impose "California values" on the Real America. At best, a certain number of Republicans will conclude that you can't really feel contempt for the protestors, because they've just fallen for delusion spread by Braids and his ilk, in this case the delusion that health care is a right and should be partially paid for through taxes (which are confiscatory by definition) rather than by individuals, their families, their neighbors, and their churches.

Let me put it in measurements that are particularly of interest to me. By 2050, it is estimated that there will be 16 million people in the United States with Alzheimer's Disease. Right now, in 2017 dollars, the estimated costs of treating and caring for AD patients is $236 billion dollars. Of that, $154 billion is picked up by Medicare and Medicaid. Tell me now how that gap is made up by a plan that virtually eliminates Medicaid entirely by the time we get to 2025. Churches? Families? Winning the Lotto?

Republicans's response to Pierce would be "Yes, that's precisely how it should be done." They might add that if you can't cobble together the money needed, you must have been deemed undeserving by a righteous God. And that's that.

This is America now. I don't think we can bridge this gap. And even if those of us who are more upset at the protest outnumber the Republicans, they vote more consistently than we do. So that's where we stand.

The tax credits for people who buy insurance on the exchanges are ... stingier than the current system. Right now, Obamacare’s tax credits cut off for people who earn four times the poverty level, which means people just over that threshold often struggle to afford insurance. Rather than fix this problem, the Senate bill would set the cutoff even lower, to three-and-a-half times the poverty level, making insurance unaffordable for more people in the middle class.

Amazingly, the Senate bill reportedly institutes deeper Medicaid cuts than the House bill.... The House version holds the program to the inflation rate plus one percent — which is historically lower than medical costs have risen, meaning that the program would have to curtail benefits for its beneficiaries, who tend to be poor and very sick. The Senate bill would cut growth down to the inflation rate, without the extra one percent.

... The tax cuts are what drive the bill’s inescapable cruelty. By eliminating nearly a trillion dollars in revenue, it necessarily creates a trillion dollars in cuts for coverage subsidies. The House bill reduces the insurance rolls by 23 million. The Senate bill won’t fare a whole lot better.

Even though the Senate bill would "effectively delay repeal of Obamacare until 2020," as Bloomberg puts it, most observers think Republicans will be blamed for any chaos in the health care system between now and whenever Obamacare starts winding down -- insurance companies will rush for the exits, policies will be unavailable or staggeringly expensive, and because we will have all seen the final passage of the bill and the big signing ceremony involving the president, we'll all agree that the GOP owns the results.

I'm not so sure. I think Republicans will still blame the bad outcome on Democrats.

In his pseudo-campaign rally last night in Cedar Rapids, we heard this from the president:

“If we went and got the single greatest health care plan in the history of the world, we would not get one Democrat vote, because they’re obstructionists,” Trump said. “If we came to you and said, ‘Here’s your plan, you’re going to have the greatest plan in history, and you’re going to pay nothing,’ they’d vote against it, folks.” ...

“If we had even a little Democrat support, just a little, like a couple of votes, you’d have everything. And you could give us a lot of votes and we’d even be willing to change it and move it around and try and make it even better,” Trump said. “But again, They just want to stop, they just want to obstruct. A few votes from the Democrats, seriously, a few votes from the Democrats, it could be so easy and so beautiful, and you’d have cooperation.”

That's going to be the right-wing narrative of our upcoming health care disaster: We Republicans passed a bad bill because Democrats forced us to. They just wanted to be the Party of No, so they refused to help make it better. Therefore, every bad consequence of what we did is their fault.

Of course, this is a preposterous. Mitch McConnell hasn't even allowed his fellow Republicans to work on the bill, or even to see it -- he certainly wasn't going to accept input from Democrats. The plan is for the bill to be rushed through the Senate (and then, I assume, the plan will be for the House to pass the Senate's bill with equal haste). And what kind of message is this for Republicans going forward? Vote for us, not for the terrible people who refused to improve the awful bill we wrote -- seriously?

But I think you'll hear this regularly in the right-wing media. I think McConnell, Paul Ryan, and other elected Republicans will brazenly argue that Democrats have some nerve complaining about the outcome when they announced an effective boycott of the process from the beginning.

The majority of Republican voters will actually fall for this. I hope very few other voters do.

Wednesday, June 21, 2017

(UPDATE: Thanks to Charlie Pierce for the link, though I think the post he meant to link is this one. I highly recommend his post, and not just because my name's in it.)

If you didn't know anything about the winning Republican candidate in yesterday's Georgia special election, good luck finding information on her at sites devoted to right-wing politics. The top story on the Breitbart home page right now is about the election, but it's not about the winner, Karen Handel, or the loser, Jon Ossoff. It's about the hated mainstream media:

It's as if media Republicans (and their readers) don't even care about the party's candidates or the policies they'll espouse when they're in Washington. All that matters is bashing their enemies, and thus reinforcing their brand: We hate Hollywood. We hate the MSM. We savor the deliciousness of liberal tears.

At this point, voter support for the GOP is almost completely divorced from policy. It's all about sticking a thumb in the eye of Rosie O'Donnell, Joy Reid, and Nancy Pelosi. I guess this is why Republicans in Congress think they won't be penalized when they vote for a horrible health care bill.